The grass is always greener and the flowers are always more colorful on the other side (of the mountain). You think that’s just a whiny statement from a beach girl wannabe, but now you can judge for yourself.

Here is the bouquet right from our friend’s yard.

Here’s just one of the flowers. I loved the shadows. I was experimenting using my 70-300 lens, which gives me fits.

I was also trying to take spider webs. If I put the button on auto focus, the camera focused perfectly until I snapped the picture, then the instant BEFORE the picture registered, the focus went out of focus, and I got blurry spiders.

If I tried to manually focus the picture, I got a splotch of light which quickly evaporated once I moved the lens a half a millimeter.

Finally I found a way to trick the camera into doing something like I wanted. I auto focused it, then I switched to manual, and snapped the picture. GOTCHA CANON REBEL XTi! HAHA!

So tomorrow I’ll show the you the unique homes I found, just in a few short blocks.

Some of our yard art automatically changes with the seasons even though California is not as seasonal as Indiana where I grew up. When I started this website, the creek behind our house that is a sandy trail for motor cycles 9 months out of the year had water in it.

In April the flowers getting most of the attention in our yard were primarily the wild, California poppies. Bees were busy.

Cherry blossoms attracted the bees, too.

Trees this year promised lots of cherries.

Things happen, and in a region where the temperature usually goes from wintry cool to instant three digit numbers, our weather pattern took a detour on April 11 and pounded our yard art.

All I could do is stand and watch the beauty and art in the storm.

Some of the living art made it. The cherries, not so much. If you look really closely you still can’t find a single cherry on the tree that looked so tempting before April 11.

By the end of May I anticipated biting into ripe juicy apricots in spite of the hail.

Tonight, two weeks later, I have lost some of my naivety about trees that tease you with their abundance.

However, I can’t totally lose heart and hope. We may not have green thumbs when it comes to fruit, but the roses bloom until the weather does get into the 100s, and the cooler than normal temperatures helped them keep up their artful color.

Some of our yard art is planned quaint.

Some is unplanned quaint.

And on this breezy, summer evening in June Puppy Girl and I enjoyed becoming part of the quaint yard art.